Verbal Tip o' The Day

Good afternoon intrepid MCAT-takers,

Thank you for all the kind words on the last tip. If I ever start to bore you on this thread, I may tell the very-hearsay anecdote about a bumbling attempt in the 90s to steal MCAT tests somewhere in California. But not today!

Today is a broader strategy, but one that for some reason test-takers either underestimate or ignore completely.

PREFACE:
You may have heard from this or that purveyor of MCAT strategies that the MCAT is full of ambiguous questions, and you need to get good at handling these ambiguities. Not true! The MCAT is HEAVILY standardized, with tons of experimental questions pre-tested, tweaked, etc etc so that there's always a clear justification for a correct answer. Your task is to figure out the concrete form behind these seemingly ambiguous questions.

STRATEGY: ABSTRACT QUESTIONS AND CHOICES
You know 'em when you see 'em: "Which of the following is a position the author would be most likely to adopt?" or "Based on the passage, the author's profession is most likely a:" and so on. Then you're presented with answer choices that may be VERY abstract.

When you see abstract questions or choices, don't leave them that way! Let's say that the passage is on British strategy during the War of 1812, and you're faced with a question on principles that has all sorts of abstracts like, say, "Overwhelming force is generally less effective than judicious use of limited resources." Sound mcatty?

After you get rid of the obviously wrong choices, start testing your choices by eliminating abstracts. "Overwhelming use of force?" If the choice is right, there's got to be some detail pertaining to overwhelming use of force in the passage. Find it; if you can't, chances are it's not there and the choice is wrong. So then: "judicious use of limited resources?" Find that too. Now consider the two details supporting these two abstracts. Was one less effective than the other? Are they in the same relation described in the answer choice? You've either got your right answer or have eliminated a wrong one.

You can do this for questions too. If you see an abstract question, or an application question introducing an unfamiliar situation, figure out what detail in the passage it's tying into--there will always be a parallel in the passage.

Getting the big idea of a passage is important, but it's not always going to get you quick points: often you'll need to go back to the passage to compare. Think of it this way--it's very hard to do math problems in your head, but on paper it becomes simpler. Likewise, trying to answer an abstract Verbal question without tying each piece to something in the passage is time-consuming and error prone. Make it concrete as possible, doing so methodically and deliberately, and you can generally knock down a high-difficulty question to one that just takes a little time.

DOUBLEDIGITSII said:

It only takes you 45 minutes to do a full length verbal section? Which means 5 min per passage! How the heck do you accomplish that??

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And that was AAMC 7, which was a bear...while I haven't tried the earlier ones lately, I imagine I could trim it down to 35-40.

The secret really isn't anything special. I've analyzed and written explanations to LOTS of passages, written many passages, and taught a lot. Eventually you get a feel for the structure the questions and right/wrong answers take, and get comfortable with intuitive algorithms for how to approach each question or passage type.

Of course, that's taken me years, and you guys have two or three weeks. But that's still a lot of time to cut seconds off everything you do. The key really is structure...when you look at a question, you should almost instantly know:

1. What type of question it is
2. How you've answered that type of question in the past
3. Approximately where in the passage you'll need to go to check your answer
4. How the MCAT likes to set up its wrong answers for that type of question.

Right now, you should be going through those things pretty explicitly, if not when taking it timed, then definitely when reviewing afterwards. If you do that enough, by test day you won't be doing anything different: you'll just be doing it faster. I'm convinced that nearly everyone can get in double digits in the Verbal with the right sort of practice. Everything you need to answer the question is on the page!

Silvr,

Your work ethic sounds great! I can vouch that the Kaplan section tests *do* tend to get harder as you go up in the numbers, as we try to keep pace with the increased difficulty on the test. When I look at the passages I wrote for #11, I'm amazed at the jump in difficulty from our earliest passages and the ones I write now...the ones I've written that we'll be putting out soon are so tough that I have trouble with them if I let them sit long enough. So don't despair.

I find that students who get down to 50/50 often miss lots of inference questions, and author's tone can lead you in the wrong direction on these. A looks-good-but-is-actually-wrong inference choice will mimic the author's tone while making a claim the details don't support. Easy to fall for.

So once you get down to that 50-50 on an inference, both choices probably reflecting author's tone pretty accurately, ask yourself, "Does this HAVE to be true based on the passage?" Be very stringent. This alone should cut the number of mistakes down significantly.

Of course, inferences aren't everything, but especially this late in the game it's best to focus on very specific things to improve your mental algorithms for answering. Try this out and let me know if it helps...in my experience, it's the single best thing someone can do to break past score barriers.

Best of luck!

frankrizzo18 said:

LukeWhite -
Out of curiosity, how do you approach passages that are very tough to understand? Do you earn 50+/60 when you finish a full section in 45 minutes? Thanks

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Frank,

My score for the 45-min AAMC 7 was 12, which was a little disappointing. More than half the questions I missed were detail questions, and a huge chunk were in a single passage...I think I missed seven questions total.

The strategies I've gone through so far are particularly applicable to tough passages, but it's probably inevitable that you'll get one passage that just seems unreasonably tough. This, I think, is intentional. Your best bet is to save this passage until the end, at which point you've hopefully saved some time on the other ones and can then devote 10-15 minutes to the hard one.

My theory is that one really tough passage is put in to reward good time management. Had I used my extra 40 minutes to go through the two passages that really bugged me on AAMC 7, I probably would have cut my errors down by 50-75% and been in the 13-14 range.

So it's not terribly helpful advice, I suppose, but don't waste effort on the tough passages early on! A wrong answer is a wrong answer, so in the worst case scenario you want to run out of time on questions you probably would have had trouble with anyway. In a better scenario, you'll have extra time at the end to devote particular attention to whatever tricks they've tossed into the Bad Passage.

SilvrGrey330 said:

Luke,

thanks for the advice. but your phrase, "does this HAVE to be true based on the passage", do you mean:

a) does it HAVE to be true with NO exceptions at all....meanings its correct

or b) does it HAVE to be true thats its demanding something too extreme...meaning its in-correct.

thats confusing to ask, tell me if im not clear

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Silvr,

The right answer to an inference question MUST be true based on the passage. Of course, it won't always seem this way at the time as you're trying to get through questions quickly. It is, however, an excellent way to separate wheat from the chaff. Another way of saying it: If an answer to an inference question may or may not be true, it's not correct.

This only works for deduction questions, so you can't apply the strategy to every question you do. There are enough deduction questions on any given section, though, that it will be a very handy tool. For those of you taking the Kaplan class, any section test will be full of them. Having written the explanations for those, I can guarantee that every right answer will have a *necessary* justification--if it didn't, we got rid of it!

I'll insert a brief plug here for those of you angling towards August--if you're unsure what test prep to use, I'd highly recommend Kaplan. I don't want to be a shill, but they got me into med school. Great stuff!